George "Geohot" Hotz received a mountain of criticism for backing down on his scuffle with Sony and settling out of court, in part because so many donated money to his legal battle. Hotz has since made amends by donating leftover legal defense money to the EFF, but many are still furious he didn't fight this thing to the end. Given what might go down with another PS3 modder -- Alexander "graf_chokolo" Egorenkov -- Hotz might have made the right move after all.

You put your money into the bank trusting that your banking institution's computer security safeguards will keep it from falling into the wrong hands. But when hackers do manage to break in and steal money from your account, should the bank be held responsible? Not according to a Maine judge who ruled in a case involving a business that sued its bank after losing $345,000 via unauthorized Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfers.

Admire the Winklevoss twins for their persistence or despise them for reneging on a promise not to pursue any further legal action against Facebook after agreeing to settle for $20 million in cash and $45 million in stock options, which today is worth more than $160 million. Either way, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss will soon be out of legal avenues (and out of the news) as the duo, along with Divya Narendra, take their beef to the U.S. Supreme Court for a final ruling.

Several technology goliaths, including Apple, Intel, and Google, are being accused of high-tech hijinks in a California class action lawsuit. The suit accuses the firms of running afoul of antitrust laws by allegedly conspiring to fix employee pay. The lawsuit also accuses the technology firms of entering into "No Solicitation" agreements with one another. The complaint, which was filed on behalf of Siddharth Hariharan, a former software engineer at Lucasfilm and founder and CEO of InEarth, seeks restitution for lost compensation and treble damages.

If you own a laptop, tablet PC, or smartphone -- and who doesn't these days? -- feel free to bring them with you when you visit the Quincy District Court in Massachusetts. Unlike nearly every other court in the country, not only does this one allow these electronic devices, but it's actually encouraging users to live blog, post to Facebook, and update their Twitter accounts once court is in session.

We don't run a feature called "Quirky Lawsuit of the Month," but if we did, two California residents who decided to sue Twitter for sending an SMS notification after they withdrew their consent would be a shoe in. Hear us out on this one. It's not that we have a problem with punishing companies that blatantly ignore opt-out requests, but that isn't what happened here. Hit the jump to find out exactly what Twitter did.

If Google is one of the most prominent Linux stalwarts around, Android is undoubtedly the public face of its love affair with the open source operating system. But its Linux affection runs deeper than that as the Internet behemoth uses the OS on everything from back-end servers to employee machines. Now, that deep-rooted love is beginning to cost Google, for a jury has fined it $5 million for infringing on a patent (U.S. Patent No. 5,893,120) held by Texas-bases patent troll Bedrock Computer Technologies.

We're not calling the Winklevoss twins insane, but if Albert Einstein were still alive, he might come to that conclusion. After all, he's the one who famously (and supposedly) said that insanity is the belief that one can get different results by doing the same thing. That pretty much describes the Winklevoss twins, who filed yet another appeal in an ongoing and uphill legal battle against Facebook for a larger slice of the social networking site's pie.

A court has ruled that debt collectors mustn't hop on Facebook to send people messages demanding repayment for money owed. The ruling came after Melanie Beacham, who was late on car payments, filed a lawsuit against MarkOne Financial for allegedly sending her a message on the social networking site, as well as contacting her friends via Facebook. Turns out that was a big mistake.

FBI investigators tried a new approach to taking down a zombie PC gang. For the first time ever, federal authorities in the U.S. seized control of the bad guys' servers, a move that required the U.S. Justice Department to seek permission from a judge in order to carry out the sting. After doing so, authorities were able to counter-attack by issuing their own commands, programming the malware to shutdown, and also log IP addresses of infected machines.